This study compares the organizational and professional commitment of teachers in charter schools and traditional public schools and explores how these differences are associated with teacher characteristics, school contextual factors, and working conditions in the two types of schools.

In this article, the authors examine how those with influence in educational policy construct the idea of “teachers” and groups associated with teachers through implicit “policy images,” and how those images are reflected in policy prescriptions and policy designs.

Maintaining rigorous and equitable classroom discourse is a worthy goal, yet there is no clear consensus of how this actually works in a classroom. This mixed-method study examines differences in discourse within and across classroom episodes (warm-ups, small group conversations, whole group conversation, etc.) that elevate, or fail to elevate, students’ explanatory rigor in equitable ways.

Do teacher knowledge and instructional quality grow in the first two years of teaching? Are they related to each other? The authors examine these questions with a sample of 45 middle school math teachers in their first two years of teaching, from 11 districts in four states.

This study examines differences in instructional quality between two higher and two lower value-added high schools, as measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System—Secondary (CLASS-S). Based on data from classroom observations and teacher interviews, it explores (a) differences in levels of instructional quality, (b) differences in the proportions of students taking advanced courses, and (c) differences in the way teachers think and talk about their classroom challenges.

This study investigates the association between two aspects of organizational culture (professional community and teacher collaboration), teacher control over school and classroom policy, and teacher job satisfaction.

How do exemplary teachers incorporate creativity in their teaching? Through in-depth interviews with National Teacher of the Year award winners, this research aims to better understand their beliefs, interests, and practices involving creative teaching. Results identify key themes of how these teachers approach the creative process, as well as the connection between their personal interests and professional creativity.

Drawing on data from the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project, this article raises several issues involved in identifying “high leverage” teaching practices based on their relationships with different types of student outcome measures.

This article reframes the debate about what fuels high rates of teacher turnover in high-poverty schools. After reviewing findings from past studies of turnover, it focuses on recent scholarship suggesting that teachers who leave such schools are not fleeing their students, but rather the poor working conditions that make it difficult for them to teach and for their students to learn.

In this study we use a human and social capital framework to explore the relationship between teachers’ social interactions and student achievement on an interim benchmark assessment. We test our hypothesis about the effects of human and social capital on student achievement using social network analysis and hierarchical linear modeling.

Our purpose is to enrich current conceptualizations of autonomy support that remain constrained by the context of study and by the limited available descriptions of teacher enactment. Toward this end, we richly describe teachers’ provision of academically significant autonomy support within an inquiry-based science curricular context to incorporate higher quality differentiations.

Using an observation protocol designed to measure classroom interactions, we find that the quality of instructional and emotional support in algebra classrooms is much weaker than classroom organization. These differences parallel observers’ relative strengths and weaknesses in reliably evaluating practice. Our finding that certain aspects of teaching are carried out better than others and observed with more consistency has implications for the evaluation and improvement of teaching.

This study examines how middle school teachers’ networks influence their mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) and instructional practices. We also examined how mathematics coaches’ expertise, in the form of MKT, plays a role in augmenting the extent to which teachers learn through interacting with close colleagues. Drawing on longitudinal data from a larger NSF-funded project that has worked with 29 middle schools in four large, urban districts, we used multilevel linear models with cross-level interaction effects and in-depth sensitivity analyses of the effects of close colleagues and coaches. Our results show that changes in teachers’ instructional practice were positively related to their access to instructional expertise through interactions with close colleagues. But we did not find a similar significantly positive association between changes in teachers’ MKT and access to their close colleagues’ MKT expertise. Rather, coaches’ MKT expertise positively moderated the extent to which teachers learned MKT from their close colleagues through seeking advice on teaching mathematics; that is, having an expert coach in the school enhanced the MKT learning opportunities that teachers had from interacting with close colleagues. Results from this study shed light on how to support teachers’ on-the-job learning and successfully implement ambitious instructional reforms in schools.

This paper examines the character and quality of instruction in afterschool tutoring programs mandated under No Child Left Behind. It draws upon a mixed-method, longitudinal study to examine the nature of the instructional setting to suggest reasons for a lack of significant effects on academic achievement.

This research uses survey and interview data to examine viewers’ reactions to the film Waiting for “Superman.” Audience members include teachers, pre-service teachers, and other educational stakeholders.

The authors employed multilevel and instrumental variables models to examine class size effects on fourth graders’ reading achievement in Greece. The results indicated a positive association between class size and reading achievement, but the association is overall insignificant, especially when classroom and school variables were taken into account.

This article presents and analyzes a variety of approaches that teachers in a struggling urban school used after a violent teacher attack ushered in a culture of chaos and fear throughout the school. As this paper suggests, many of these approaches failed to generate the authority necessary to restore student engagement and the relational trust between teachers and students that they had lost following this incident. At the same time, one teacher implemented an approach that allowed him to reclaim his authority, repair the teacher-student relationship, and increase student engagement in his classroom. Drawing on various theories about power and authority in schools, I argue that the degree to which these different approaches created engaging learning environments and restored a meaningful teacher-student relationship depended on whether students recognized a teacher’s authority as legitimate.

This article proposes explicitly braiding equity and technology scholarship to address a central challenge for education research today: figuring out how and when low-cost and commonplace technologies, in combination with face-to-face talk and paper, can support necessary communications between the range of supporters who share students, schools, a district and a diverse community. The article calls such work improving the communication infrastructure of public education, and proposes that researchers join educators, youth and families in the design task.

Alternative teacher certification programs have surfaced as a popular remedy to alleviate anxieties about the quality of teachers in hard-to-staff schools and in such high needs areas as mathematics. Despite the growth in the number and influence of alternative route programs their particulars remain largely unexamined. This study addresses this situation by investigating the preparation of mathematics teachers in the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) program, an alternative route program of national prominence.

This comparative, longitudinal study of 30 beginning teachers from three mission-driven, teacher education programs explores career commitments among beginning teachers and how school environments shape them. The study confirms the importance of administration support and professional community even for elite college graduates who are highly motivated to teach and make a difference in the lives of children.

In this article, the authors identify types of learning outcomes that community-based placements in teacher education potentially afford teacher candidates, as well as factors that make some placements more educative than others. The authors offer a theoretical lens that attends to variation in learning, which could be leveraged in future empirical work and by doing so, contribute to the field’s developing efforts to identify key social justice teaching practices and to conceptualize pedagogies of enactment for such practices.

To teach for instrumental and innovative growth for both student and teacher is not simply a technical challenge. It is a moral task, requiring intimacy in the service of developing autonomy. It involves moral sensitivity and moral perception in prompting and framing responsible pedagogical action. It is an emotionally fraught enterprise, one that runs headlong into the human resistance to development and growth (Bion, 1994). What follows is an uncovering of this pedagogical responsibility. As we shall show, the way in to the moral dimensions of a teacher’s work is the same path that leads to academic effectiveness. Taking the moral seriously is not a diversion from the preparation and development of effective teachers, nor is it an added consideration; it is central to the very possibility of responsive and responsible education.

The purpose of this chapter is to understand the spiritual dimensions of teaching by elucidating the cardinal and forgotten virtue of reverence. Reverence has a power beyond a typical understanding of it as something religious. Reverence involves a sense of wonder and awe for something or someone that meets at least one of the following conditions: (1) something we cannot control; (2) something we cannot create; (3) something we cannot fully understand; (4) something transcendent, even supernatural The chapter shows reverence in a wider context that does not diminish its spiritual connotations, but rather shows its importance and relevance to teaching in today’s classrooms.

Teacher Quality Overall, the chapters in this edited volume provide the reader with a portrait of a good teacher and good teaching methods and encourage districts to set high standards for teachers, to develop strong accountability systems for measuring performance, to reward those who perform and frown on those who do not.

Center for the Study of Teaching and PolicyCTP is one of 12 national research centers funded by the Department of Education. It functions as a consortium, drawing together researchers from five universities—Teachers College/Columbia, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Washington (lead institution). CTP tracks the enactment and effects of policies aimed at the improvement of teaching in various contexts and at multiple levels of the system, identifying ways these policies support, stimulate, impede, or otherwise affect the quality of teaching and learning in U.S. elementary and secondary schools.

Oxford Review of EducationThe object of the Oxford Review of Education is to advance the study of
education. It especially wishes to promote the elaboration and evaluation of a
body of speculative and empirical theory, the development of which might
improve educational practice.

Testing Teacher Candidates: The Role of Licensure Tests in Improving Teacher Quality Examines the appropriateness and technical quality of teacher licensure tests currently in use, evaluates the merits of using licensure test results to hold states and institutions of higher education accountable for the quality of teacher preparation and licensure, and suggests alternatives for developing and assessing beginning teacher competence.

The Consortium for Policy Research in Education The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) unites researchers from five of the nation's leading universities to improve elementary and secondary education through research on policy, finance, school reform, and school governance.

Teacher Test Accountability:
From Alabama to MassachusettsThe purpose of this article is to highlight some of the psychometric results reported by National Evaluation Systems (NES) in their 1999 Massachusetts Educator Certification Test (MECT) Technical Report, and more specifically, to identify those technical characteristics of the MECT that are inconsistent with the Standards. A second purpose of this article is to call for the establishment of a standing test auditing organization with investigation and sanctioning power.